Brazil
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While the proceedings, practice and context for fighting corruption have greatly changed over the past thirty years, at the same time moral codes have become increasingly rigid and there has been a trend to blame the individual, which is not – in and of itself – wrong. But personal blame should not be at the expense of recognizing a broader political culture that needs to be confronted equally earnestly. This reduction of the political sphere to one that is moralistic, individual and characterized by cronyism can be seen in displays of noisy activism. It is as if Brazilian citizens have grown accustomed to living their daily lives on some sort of roller coaster, consuming the news as if it were a mini-series or soap opera. Nevertheless, the fact that Brazilian citizens’ indignation has apparently subsided is the most shocking thing of all. The anger that led citizens to take to the streets between 2015 and 2016, claiming that the only solution to corruption in Brazil would be through criminal law proceedings, seems to have ben extinguished. Either that, or it was entirely spent in August 2016. No one is protesting on the streets any more.
Even though not very much time has passed, it is still difficult to understand why the enormous protests against corruption have disappeared. Nor do we know why this has happened precisely when there have been so many accusations of cronyism and embezzlement of public funds. On the one hand, the Workers’ Party, a major participant in building democracy in Brazil, has systematically failed to re-establish its reputation as a party that is above corruption. Nor have members of the party provided answers to accusations of corruption directed at several party leaders. On the other hand, the government is far from being in the clear. Less than one year after the vote to impeach then President Rousseff, Supreme Court Minister Edson Fachin started an investigation of eight ministers in the current administration. The list of those being investigated also includes the presidents of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, twenty-four senators, forty federal deputies, three governors and all of the former presidents of Brazil elected since 1988, with the exception of former presidents Tancredo Neves and Itamar Franco. Former President Rousseff’s opponent Aécio Neves is among those being investigated. The investigation includes charges of corruption, ideological falsehoods, money laundering, fraud and the formation of cartels. Brazil’s major political parties are also involved in accusations of embezzlement of public funds and illicit campaign financing, including the Democrats (Democratas, DEM), the Democratic Labour Party (Partido Democrático Trabalhista, PDT), the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, the Progressive Party and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party. President Temer himself has done everything he can to exonerate himself and to block the Attorney General’s investigation of his possible passive participation in corruption. To that end, he substituted deputies on the Constitution and Justice Commission, agreed to amendments to the federal budget, negotiated positions in the second and third tiers of his government, and made concessions to deputies from every political party, including those affecting the environment.26
At the time of writing, the crisis is acute. Nevertheless, it may lead to the posing of very serious questions that have yet to be asked. This crisis may even promote changes, giving rise to meaningful words and actions – in the public sphere, and in the world of politics.
We have already written that the history of Brazil is not a destiny – it is made up of choices, projects and their consequences. We all know this is not the first time the country has faced a crisis of great magnitude and proportion. Everything seen at close range seems to be gigantic, with no future and no possible escape. But if history helps us to recall the past, it must also reveal the many times over the years Brazil has relied on periods of introspection. And, incidentally, the country has always found its way.
Belo Horizonte/São Paulo, August 2017.
Illustrations
1. Johann Freschauer’s coloured engraving from 1505 reflects the earliest period of European contact with Brazil, when the collective imagination ran wild, with the inhabitants shown as warriors and barbarians eating human flesh. In the background, Portuguese ships bring ‘civilization’.
2. The Portuguese cartographer and cosmographer Lopo Homem travelled the world under royal warrant to help demarcate the Treaty of Tordesillas. In this map he draws Portuguese ships, compasses, parrots and indigenous peoples at war in the recently discovered territory. He also includes the brazilwood trees, used by the native peoples in craftwork and for decorative dyes, which were of great interest to Lisbon.
3. A colour engraving of 1662 by Johannes Blaeu. The discovery of the New World flooded the European imagination; visions were split between Eden and Hell. Since Native Americans did not leave written records, the only representations we have are European, reflecting Western conventions. America was the ideal place on which to project stereotypes of decadent, yet at the same time idyllic, indigenous peoples.
4. In spite of the triumphant discourse of the Portuguese regarding their great voyages, their success was the result of a long process of trial and error, involving substantial losses and shipwrecks. These probably sixteenth-century images from the Book of the Armadas of India show a variety of disasters.
5. The first sugar plantations (engenhos) began to spread throughout Pernambuco in around 1535. Initially, the term engenho was used in reference to just the sugar mill. With time, the term came to mean the entire sugar production complex: the land, buildings, and crops. In this seventeenth-century painting, Frans Post’s depiction is strangely idyllic.
6–7. Albert Eckhout (1618–66) lived in the Captaincy of Pernambuco during Dutch rule. His illustrations reflect what his clients wanted to see: the exotic practices of those peoples. The painter depicts the Tapuia woman holding a slain enemy’s hand and foot in an allusion to cannibalism, of which Eckhout had no first-hand knowledge. The couple are part of a series that includes other groupings: ‘Brasilianen’, ‘Tapuya’, Africans, mulattoes and mamelucos.
8. The slave market of Pernambuco, painted by Zacharias Wagener (1614–68) while he worked as a soldier with the Dutch West India Company. The Dutch colony was supplied with African slaves from Angola and Guinea.
9. The majority of slaves who disembarked in Brazil during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries worked in the sugar mills. The work was exhausting. In this drawing by Frans Post, a man of small stature (right), fully clothed and with a hat and sword, inspects the process.
10. Part of a group of thirty-eight watercolours attributed to Joaquim José de Miranda painted between 1771 and 1773, this drawing depicts the final confrontation in Paraná, which took place between the expedition under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Afonso Botelho de Sampaio e Sousa and the Kaingang Indians. Due to the Kaingangs’ supposed ‘indomitable disposition’, a policy of virtual genocide was adopted. This image shows a rare Indian success.
11. Tiradentes was a faceless hero. Although extremely famous for his participation in the Minas Conspiracy, all the images we have of him are imaginary. His image therefore was free to become Christ-like – the beard and long hair and the clothing. In this painting by Antônio Parreiras (Niterói, 1860–1937), Tiradentes is immortalized as a hero of the Republic.
12. Many different peoples came from the African continent, including Balantas, Manjak, Bijango, Mandinga and Jalofo. They brought with them diverse religious traditions that took on new meanings as these mixed with Catholicism. Carlos Julião (1740–1811) was a Portuguese-Italian artist who worked in Brazil as an inspector of forts. He painted rare images of African life in Brazil.
13. Dom Pedro I’s coronation ceremony on 1 December 1822 combined traditional European elements with idealized characteristics of Brazil, a mixture of Old World costumes and new symbols. Jean-Baptiste Debret’s painting did the same thing, copying an original done for an Austrian monarch and altering the shape and size of the church where the ceremony was held.
14. The African slave trade was in the nineteenth century still a cornerstone of the local economy. This slave market
in Rio de Janeiro scandalized foreign visitors, including Jean-Baptiste Debret. He painted the practically naked, skeletal slaves and the children with their distended stomachs. Note the contrast with the trader, with his big belly and aura of disdain, and with the standing man with his symbols of power: an arrogant posture, boots, hat and cane.
15. External pressure to end the slave trade increased and, between 1839 and 1842, the British led the movement by intensifying the seizure of slave ships. In 1845 the British sloop Albatross captured the Brazilian ship Albanez with 750 slaves on board, depicted in this painting by navy officer Francis Maynell.
16. Commissioned by the Empire, the Battle of Avay, by Pedro Américo, was completed seven years after the Paraguayan War ended. The public’s reaction to the painting was divided at the time: some appreciated the wealth of detail, while others criticized the bloodbath. The panoramic view denotes the grandeur of the event, but the violence conspicuously depicted is clearly in criticism of the Empire.
17. By the end of the 1870s, the Indigenous Romantic movement, which has already dominated literature, reached painting. The Native Hero was appropriated to represent the origins of Brazil and to foment nationalism. In Iracema, José M. Medeiros (1849–1925) depicted José de Alencar’s protagonist from the very popular eponymous novel, published in 1865. Her representation was fitting for the times: a passive figure destined to die for the life of the nation.
18. On the morning of 15 November 1889, pro-republican conspirators in the army headed to the Campo de Santana in Rio de Janeiro. There were no heroic acts and the population at large was oblivious to the plans. Pedro II was informed of the coup and the founding of the Republic. This painting depicts masses of people, who were never there, cheering Marechel Deodoro da Fonseca.
19. The triumphant Republic (a woman in a Phrygian cap dressed like a Roman) stands on a winged chariot, galloping through the sky. Frederico Steckel’s allegory is a wall painting done in 1898 for the old Secretary of the Interior of Minas Gerais building, now the Minas Memorial.
20. In 1880, four days after signing the law abolishing slavery in Brazil, a multitude of nearly 20,000 people, among them whites, blacks and mulattoes, filled the Campo de Santana in Rio de Janeiro for the ceremony celebrating the act. The Royal Family is to the left, with Princess Isabel seated strategically in the middle of the tent, which had been specially made for her.
21. The Republic was going through dizzying modernization: Avenida Central in Rio de Janeiro was an icon of the times, with electric streetlights and art nouveau façades; The Theatro Municipal of São Paulo in 1911 revealed how the travelers’ old ‘clay city’ had been transformed into a European-inspired coffee metropolis; meanwhile, construction in Belo Horizonte evoked a republican utopia: straight streets, imposing avenues, and an enormous park – the Praça da Liberdade, whose English-style gardens and lakes were geometrically positioned throughout.
22. On 5 July 1922, twenty-eight rebel lieutenants participating in the Copacabana Fort revolt refused to surrender. They chopped up the Brazilian flag, divided it amongst themselves and left the Fort, heading toward the Leme district, where they faced 4,000 legalist soldiers. On Avenida Atlântica, ten gave up. The remaining eighteen, including one civilian who had joined the movement, continued their walk. Only two men survived the ensuing shootout. The lieutenants’ march divided the officer class and brought on a cycle of military revolts that would eventually topple the First Republic.
23. In 1937, the integralistas paraded through Rio de Janeiro to launch the presidential candidacy of their supreme leader, Plínio Salgado, in elections scheduled for the following year.
24. For ten years, the Youth Parade united young people between the ages of eleven and eighteen. The proliferation of civic demonstrations during the Estado Novo was meant to give the impression of a united nation, supporting one leader, Getúlio Vargas. In this photograph, the monumental columns in front of the gigantic image of Vargas evoke fascist propaganda.
25. In 1951 reporter Arlindo Silva, accompanied by photographer José Medeiros, visited the candomblé terreiros (worship sites) in Salvador. The photographs, in the magazine O Cruzeiro, were controversial because they showed secret, sacred locations unseen by the non-practising public. As a result of this article, the Banto Candomblé site was closed. This image is of an Iaô, a novice in a state of worship going through the initiation ritual.
26. A large crowd accompanies President Vargas’s body to Santos Dumont airport in Rio de Janeiro, from where it went to Rio Grande do Sul for burial. But once the aeroplane had taken off people realized that they were right in front of the General Headquarters of the 3rd Air District. The Air Force took up their arms, with soldiers and officers firing at the furious, unarmed civilians.
27. As President Kubitscheck liked to say, he ‘flew in any weather and landed on any field’. The Targets Plan advanced, Brasília was under construction and he wanted to see Brazil ‘progress fifty years in five’. He was very good at marketing. In official photos, he was always surrounded by achievements: in this case in an automobile made in a factory with 50 per cent Brazilian parts.
28. Highway construction in many ways was a rebirth of the ‘Westward March’ mentality. It was a broad programme of territorial expansion announced by Getúlio Vargas. This photograph depicts the start of the BR-364 highway construction. The highway set out to challenge the Amazon rainforest by connecting the cities of Cuiabá (Mato Grosso), Porto Velho (Rondônia) and Rio Branco (Acre).
29. The composition of this photograph is probably the result of professional experience and a great deal of luck on the part of Orlando Brito. The classic image of the triumphant ruler has been inverted: the most imperial of generals to have ever governed Brazil, Ernesto Geisel, has become a mere detail before the colossal Brazilian flag. A fluke in lighting, however, lends the flag an aura of mourning that, for just an instant, captures the mood in Brazil.
30. The great metal workers’ strikes of 1978, 1979 and 1980, which took place in the ABC region, gave rise to the organization of unions that not only opposed the dictatorship but also strove to organize workers at grassroots level, on factory floors. The workers, led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, voted in enormous assemblies.
31. Street culture – hip-hop – became popular in the mid-1980s in central São Paulo. Groups of young people, most of them from peripheral zones, would meet at the São Bento metro station. Later, rappers and graffiti artists joined these groups. By the end of the decade, the cultural language of the streets became a highly visible in Brazil’s public spaces.
Notes
The full bibliography for the book in Portuguese can be found in the original Brazilian edition.
INTRODUCTION
1. This book was originally written in 2014. In the Afterword we address changes that have occurred since that time.
CHAPTER 1
1. Pseudonym of Sérgio Porto (1923–1968), Brazilian essayist, journalist and composer.
2. At the command of their Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Christopher Columbus captained the first expedition to reach the Americas, on 12 October 1492.
3. The semantic distinction between anthropophagy and cannibalism is explained later in this chapter.
4. The Genesis account (9:20–9:27) is confusing. Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan and not Ham himself. There are also many controversial interpretations of the act that provoked the curse, thought by many scholars to have been a far more serious offence.
5. Noah’s curse on Ham allegedly included the black people of Africa who were said to be his descendants. The verses in Genesis that list his descendants (10:6–10:20) give no explanation for this. The Midrash states that Cush, one of Ham’s sons, was a sub-Saharan African and it was through him that the curse was passed on.
6. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici (1463–1503) was educated under the tutelage of his cousin Lorenzo il Magnifico. One of his teachers was Amerigo Vespucci’s uncle, Giorgio Ant
onio Vespucci. Amerigo himself was Lorenzo’s fellow student and became both a friend and an employee. In the early 1500s Amerigo Vespucci sent most of his famous letters from the New World to Lorenzo.
7. Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, pp. 102–4.
8. Dom Afonso III (King Alphonse III) of the House of Burgundy, King of Portugal from 1248 to 1279.
9. See also, among others, Júnia Ferreira Furtado, O mapa que inventou o Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Versal, 2013.
10. Dom Afonso V (King Alphonse V), of the House of Aviz, King of Portugal from 1438 to 1481.
11. Dom João II (King John II), of the House of Aviz, King of Portugal from 1481 to 1495.
12. The comments that follow on life at sea during the great discoveries are taken from Paulo Miceli, O ponto onde estamos: Viagens e viajantes na história da expansão e da conquista. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2008.